Gideon's Spies полностью

Each pilot wore two suits: his flight suit and, over it, the G-suit, a torso harness, survival gear, and a helmet. Clipped to each harness was a small gadget that would send a homing-signal if he was forced to abandon the mission.

At one minute to midnight the first F-151, with a roar and a plume of exhaust marking its progress, sped down the runway. Shortly after midnight the last of the planes had retracted its wheels. Sunrise had started.

The mission was a total success. Satellite images showed the complete destruction of the complex and, the next day, Syrian bulldozers covering the blitzed area with earth to avoid the spread of radiation. It would be ten days before the country’s vice president, Farouk al-Sharaa, would only say: “Our military and political echelon is looking into the matter.” In Tel Aviv Ehud Olmert, not quite able to conceal his smile, said: “You will understand we naturally cannot always show the public our cards.” But to play them, in the early hours of the morning of September 6, 2007, those pilots had carried out one of the most daring air strikes ever.

In January 2008, three days after President Bush had left Israel, where he had been privately briefed on the mission, the Israeli Defense Force released a satellite image that showed Syria had commenced rebuilding the destroyed site.

On Saturday morning, February 2, 2008, a man emerged from the U-Bahn, Berlin’s railway system, and stood outside the subway exit on the Kurfüerstendamm, the city’s elegant shopping quarter. He had started his journey in one of the eastern suburbs of the city and its purpose was contained in the briefcase he carried. A car pulled up, the driver opened the passenger door, and together they drove off.

Who the man was and what he had been asked to do was known, apart from the driver, to only Meir Dagan and a handful of senior Mossad officers in Tel Aviv. They had patiently waited for the car’s passenger to obtain what they wanted.

Six months before, the driver introduced himself to the man as “Reuben.” It was not his real name: like all other details about his identity, it remained in a secure room where the names of all current katsas, field agents, were kept in Mossad headquarters. A few days ago, the man had left a message at one of the agreed dead-letter boxes, which Reuben regularly checked, that he was ready to deliver what he had been asked to provide in return for a substantial sum of euros, half as a down payment, the balance on delivery of what was now in his briefcase.

They were photos of Imad Mughniyeh. Next to Osama bin Laden, he was the world’s most wanted terrorist.

Long before the al-Qaeda leader had launched his pilots against New York’s Twin Towers and the Pentagon in Washington, Mughniyeh had introduced suicide bombers into the Middle East. The Hezbollah terrorist mastermind had read an account of the WWII Japanese kamikaze pilots in Hezbollah’s own newspapers, Al Sabia and Al Abd, which had praised the pilots for their sacrifices. In the alleys and souks of Beirut, Mughniyeh had persuaded families it was a matter of honor to provide a son, or sometimes even a daughter, for similar sacrifices. They had remained the human weapons of choice against Israel, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Those who had chosen to die were remembered in Friday prayers in the shadowy coolness of the mosques, after the rhetoric of the muezzin calling for the destruction of all those who opposed Hezbollah.

The deaths of the young bombers were lauded and their memories kept alive. Mughniyeh told their families the souls of their children needed no more, that their suicide bombings would be remembered forever and assured them a place in Hezbollah’s version of Heaven.

Like bin Laden, Mughniyeh had been hunted across the Middle East and beyond by Mossad, the CIA, and every other Western intelligence service. But each time he came close to capture, he escaped, the trail gone cold. Until now.

On that cold winter day in February 2008, with a bitterly harsh wind from the Polish steppes whistling through the streets of Berlin, Reuben drove along past the smoke-blackened ruins of the Gedäechtniskirche, the church that was a memorial to the Allied bombing raids of WWII, a grim contrast to all the other buildings, which made the city look like any other European capital.

At some point the man produced a file from his briefcase and, in return, replaced it with an envelope Reuben handed over containing the balance of the fee for the images in the file.

The cover of the gray-colored document bore the stamp of what was once one of the most powerful agencies in the German Democratic Republic, the GDR, itself at one time the most important satellite nation in the former Soviet Union. The stamp identified the file had once belonged to the Stasi, the security service of the GDR’s Ministry of State Security.